Dr Sara Erridge

Edinburgh Cancer Centre
University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh

Improving treatment for brain tumours

Dr Sara Erridge is a cancer doctor specialising in the treatment of brain tumours. She is running a clinical trial to find the best way to treat a type of brain tumour called glioma.

The trial, called BR14, is comparing two ways of treating a particularly aggressive type of glioma called anaplastic glioma. One group of patients will be treated with radiotherapy alone, while three other groups will be given different combinations of radiotherapy and a drug called temozolomide. Around 750 people around the world will be recruited for the study, including 250 from the UK.

Dr Erridge and her team hope to discover whether adding temozolomide helps patients to live longer than if they were treated with radiotherapy alone. And they will also find out if the drug causes any unacceptable side effects, which could affect a patient’s quality of life.

If the trial shows that treatment with temozolomide does improve the outcome for patients, then this could become the standard way to treat anaplastic glioma in the future.

There is more information about the BR14 trial on our CancerHelp UK clinical trials database.